


Exit Music

by montparnasse



Series: Eclipse and Transit [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Lie Low At Lupin's, M/M, Post-Break Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-22 18:02:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13769571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: Somerset, 1995. Maybe it's still a love story.





	Exit Music

For the nth time he dreamed he was dying. More precisely he dreamed Remus was killing him: over the sink in the shoebox of a kitchen he held Sirius’s wrists between his cold hands like a butchered animal on a hook, watching the blood slide from the open veins onto the steel where it splattered pointillist cryptograms all the way down the drain as Remus read them for signs, divining what was left of use inside him. When he discerned that it was nothing Remus took out his wand and stuck it down Sirius’s throat to sever his arteries but through the blistering shame and the bolt of rage galvanizing across every nervous synapse as if he’d just come alive again Sirius couldn’t even lift his numb arms to wrap his hands around Remus’s throat. Thus spake the void: he woke shivering on the couch with cold sweat dampening his hairline and a ringing in his left ear, a nightbird calling outside the window, long and lonesome. In the air like a pure spinal strike of déjà vu he could smell rain.

As a teenager he’d come to this house in the summers with and sometimes without James and occasionally with Peter, whose parents were quietly suspicious of the Lupins in a way that was rather more obvious than they thought, loath as they were to leave their son with people who couldn’t afford a house-elf. He’d come alone by train at the end of August ‘76, just before the start of sixth year with only a few months of sickening distance between their summer skin and the Snafu, which hilariously enough turned out to be neither the first nor the last and perhaps not even the worst; they spent most of their time listening to records stoned in Remus’s draughty attic bedroom and taking long walks in the nighttime woods where they talked a lot and said almost nothing until Sirius, bored of the charade, asked Remus if they were ever going to get the fuck over it. Two days later Remus held him down in the old barn where he transformed during the full moons at home and made Sirius watch as the knife of it erupted from his gut to his chest and his throat—Cesarean birth, mouth open to let the other out, moon in his beating blood, spreading like cancer rotting every organ—until the pain collapsed his limbs like a deck of cards and Sirius backed away to transform, heart and lungs and jolting brain subsumed blessedly beneath the dog’s simpler mind. In the morning they crept back inside and took turns puking as quietly as possible in the toilet so as not to wake Remus’s mother, who was still asleep on the couch. But afterwards things were marginally better between them.

Nearly twenty years later the house was remarkably unchanged: same dusty fireplace, same scratched kitchen table, same untended rosebushes, same crooked stairs, same crooked roof, same crooked man in the attic haunting himself better than any ghost living or dead could ever manage. Days ago Remus had told him he’d rented the place out for nearly a decade while he wandered the burnt-over edges of the earth, searching for an echo of some primordial understanding in the wounds he sought there; at times, he explained, it had been his only reliable source of income. He’d said all of this from the very opposite end of the couch while Sirius looked through the few relics he hadn’t torched or sold or run over with the back tires of his shitty station wagon during the wide open nothing-years, staring out the window with his shoulders pinched very tight, like he expected Sirius to be overcome with some dormant dam-burst of uncomprehending emotion and jump him at any minute. Altogether it was very obvious that Remus didn’t want him there. When he left to go into town for cigarettes Sirius ripped up every single letter and threw them in the kitchen trash where the mosaic of faded ink lay incriminating and ruinous like the runic detritus of a ritual gone wrong. This time, in the bleeding-raw morning after, he laid on the couch listening to Remus take the trash out to the bin and make breakfast with the old radio crackling on the table as if he hadn’t noticed anything.

This was when he woke up really.

—

“Why did you come here,” Remus had asked him while they were shelling peas into a bucket in the back garden. The back door was open and the radio was playing something he thought he recognized, like a scent or a birdcall from very far away, but he couldn’t knead it into place.

“The old man told me to,” said Sirius, “but I could always—Vance said I could stay as long as I wanted but it might be impossible, you know, logistically, with the Ministry and all.”

“But it didn’t occur to you that it might be logistically difficult for _me_.”

This could be viewed through several translational lenses: Remus was seeing someone, a blond Muggle artist (or so he claimed) who left his cigarette stubs in the windowsills and dressed like a Marks and Spencer clearance rack. He had a sleeping pattern he liked to stick to and Sirius had been interfering with it willfully or otherwise since September 1971. In the gulf of the interim years it seemed his cooking repertoire had expanded from three meals to a mostly-edible four and he seemed to dislike sharing the second seat at his table, though Sirius supposed the real problem was that Remus had never liked taking care of other people and had spent entirely too much time continent-hopping and dropping acid and feeling sorry for himself in the ‘80s. Dimly he understood that this wasn’t a fair assessment but given how little Remus seemed to taste of his life or even like it most of the time and how altogether obvious it was that he didn’t want Sirius in his house it was difficult at times to be anything but resentful.

“Like I said, I could go back to Vance’s. But you’re the one who’s gonna get the guilt trip from hell from Dumbledore, not me.”

“For what.”

“Throwing me out?”

“I’m not throwing you out, stop—you always used to say _I_ was the one desperate to martyr myself.” In fact Sirius had said so just that morning, but either Remus hadn’t heard or he was choosing magnanimously to ignore it. Far off across the brilliant lilting swath of the July hills a train whistle rolled up through the humid breath of the wind in the trees, green as the stormclouds across the river and twining through the song on the radio like static from another world; Remus sighed into it and stretched his long legs out across the grass showing three pale inches of ankle above his loafers even though he’d let the hem down on his pants years ago. “All I was saying is that it makes things harder than they already are. Objectively speaking there are better places he could’ve sent you.”

“Maybe you and Molly Weasley can have tea and discuss all the better places I could be right now,” said Sirius. He slit open a pea pod with his bitten-bloody thumbnail and poured the peas into the bucket where they made a sound like pouring spring rain on a roof. If Molly Weasley had her way he suspected he’d be on the first boat back to Azkaban at the barest light of dawn cracking over the horizon. “And maybe you could finally let her set you up with some poor woman in need of a man to give meaning to her empty husband-less life.”

“God, knock it off.”

“I can only assume she wasn’t reading the papers in ‘81.”

“Plenty of people figure out I’m gay who didn’t read the gorey details in the _Prophet_ ,” said Remus, not looking at him. After Sirius’s arrest said gorey details had been gleefully alluded to in the _Prophet_ though not stated outright, as he understood they were in certain others. Of course they’d brought it all up at his trial. Even drugged and confined to a Ministry holding cell as he was at the time he felt it as its own separate and perfect violation, like they’d paraded him naked up and down Diagon Alley or Portobello Road screaming it into the celebratory streets; over the next few years it would serve as one of many convenient excuses for the creation of new discriminatory laws which would result in untold deaths, and incalculable suffering. Perhaps he really shouldn’t blame Remus for all the continent-hopping and acid-dropping. “Besides you know how she is, even if she knew she’d probably take it as a challenge or something to correct at least one of my dire moral failings. She just reminds you too much of your own mother, that’s why you don’t like her.”

“That’s definitely the only reason. Just like your half-assed amateur psychoanalysis is the only reason I can’t stand you right now.”

“You couldn’t stand me before. Why would that change now.”

“Definitely no reason for that either,” said Sirius, but instead of lowering his center of gravity for a fight like a cornered animal the way he’d always known Remus to do whenever he was metaphorically slapped upside the head with his myriad fuckups he went very still, as if he’d caught the scent of his own blood.

The air had sort of solidified with the coming rain and he could hear thunder shivering in the dark loam underneath his bare feet as he thought that maybe he should apologize, which was what he’d been thinking about since the Shrieking Shack a year ago in gestures alternately florid and impoverished, and yet after months of this relentless circumlocution spinning on loop in his head he could find neither the words nor the nerve. So instead he’d said nothing. “Look,” he tried, “it’s not—”

“They interrogated me, you know. But you wouldn’t know,” said Remus. His jaw was clenched very tight and he was staring down at Sirius’s chapped red knuckles where the old ink which was his blood wove spider-veined in strange un-shapes up his wrists such that he had to resist the urge to pull his flannel sleeves down from his elbows. “It was two days after Dearborn disappeared.”

Ice, crumbling in his belly, spreading acid up his spine and into his throat. “What—why the hell would—”

“We’d fought—or more like, we argued a bit, a couple of days before he went missing. I was sleeping on Rhys Rowntree’s couch in Leeds and he’d sent me an owl wanting to talk but I burnt it.” Likely Remus had been sleeping in Rhys Rowntree’s bed but by that point Sirius had been sleeping in worse places and would’ve been a hypocrite to mention it. “That was the first week of September, I think, second at the latest. Then I saw him as I was leaving Dumbledore’s office a few days later and we went out to the pub. I didn’t really want to go but he was just, he was alone. He was never very good at being alone.”

Remus was slouching miserably as he often did and in the greengold patina of unlight still coming through the clouds he looked much younger, or maybe much older, like some priceless relic unearthed from the crypt of his attic bedroom and held up to the dormer window. It was true that he couldn’t stand Remus. Being around him was like a constant arthritic ache grinding in his jaw and his shoulders down to his hips and throbbing into his knees, his body leaden with the accumulated meanings of time and history, haunted by memory, pain exuding hot and needle-bright from the unkillable imprints Remus had gouged out of his very fucking soul. But even here—even now, even after everything, not once in his undear life had anything ever looked as good to him as Remus did in a slant of sunlight.

“After we left I walked with him for a bit towards the tube station. He thought I was back with you, or that I wanted to be, and he was saying he couldn’t understand why. And we were a little drunk so I told him all of it, you know, never going back again et cetera, not with you or with him. But especially not with you.” Remus’s smile was sharpish just so, and cruel, the blunt white edge of an eyetooth bared above his lower lip. “So he started airing every grievance I guess he ever had with me and I told him to fuck off and he’d stormed off somewhere before we made it to the station. That was the last time I ever saw him. And I assume someone was listening because two days after he disappeared a team of aurors came pounding on on the door in the middle of the night and they knew, like, everything. All of it, I mean almost word for word. Like I was being followed.”

Sirius’s mouth was so dry he could hardly speak and under his flannel even in the clammy blue humidity he could feel he’d sweat through his shirt. “Peter?”

“Most likely. But not necessarily. You and James were hardly the only ones who thought it was me, remember.” Again he was watching Sirius’s hands, which had gone still. “I thought it was you. Even before everything else. They kept me in a holding cell with silver runes on the walls in the Ministry basement for three days and asked me the same questions a thousand times and I think they would’ve kept me there just in case if Dumbledore hadn’t threatened to expose the lack of process and all, not that anyone would have cared much. But when they asked me about you I told them. How you hated him. The things you said in the Lake District that summer.”

Just before Sirius’s sentencing—it had not been a sentencing as there had not been a trial but all present had referred to it as such, presumably as a technicality in the event any of them grew a conscience when the ashes settled—they’d questioned him about Caradoc Dearborn’s death and also his dear dead brother. Barty Crouch and Griselda Marchbanks sat before him with a team of aurors at his back constantly reworking the heavy wards as a precaution while Dumbledore watched him over the rim of his half-moon glasses, gleaming brittle-bright as a glint of black ice with that strange mild disappointment, as if Sirius was a bag of Every Flavor Beans he’d dropped all over the sidewalk and wasn’t going to pick up. If he stretched the elastic of his moth-bitten memory as far as it would go he recalled that they had asked him things they could not possibly have known unless Remus had told them. Crouch he remembered had said something like, if you have any humanity left to you at all you’ll tell us, and Sirius opened his mouth to say something, like if I have any humanity left it’s your dearest aim to take it from me as the old man sitting between you has been taking it from me sip by sip for three years now so why bother. Instead he just started to laugh.

In the end they couldn’t conjure enough evidence to concretely tie him to Dearborn’s murder or to his brother’s final cryptic machinations, though if he could’ve stopped laughing for long enough he might have told them what those were if only for the unbelieving looks on their pinched faces; he wasn’t sure he even believed it himself. Rather it was all heavily implied, and the _Prophet_ took great pains to ensure readers that hard evidence would be forthcoming soon although this apocryphal proof never materialized, and by then it wouldn’t have mattered any more than the abject absence of any process following his arrest: the fever had broken. Through New Year’s 1982 there were postwar parties and feasts across the country wherever one happened to find themselves, the most extravagant typically held by the people who had been the least affected. Amnesia caught like a disease; any interest in real change or justice beyond a handful of arrests was tempered by the magical world’s desire to hastily move on rather than look back into the abyss, as the favored maxim went in those days. He remembered thinking that if they could’ve looked themselves collectively in the eye for longer than four seconds it would be impossible to ignore the rot spreading tumescent and grotesque from the very core—from the exact bleeding wound. Thus they propagated and nurtured it within themselves until at last the beast slouched home to roost, again and again and again.

He blinked. He didn’t know how long it had been but he had forgotten where he was again; the rainclouds had blotted out the last of the sun and the long grass under the big dusky sky was bent in nearly half with the wind which was so fragrant and wet with rain he wondered if the season had changed again while he wasn’t looking. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Beside him Remus was shelling peas again in the stale silence and Sirius couldn’t see his face. “Do you still think I did it,” he asked anyway.

“I’m not sure it makes any difference to me,” said Remus, “what you did or didn’t do. That’s what I’m telling you.”

A few minutes later the rain peeled out from the clouds with the first flash of lightning whiting out the trees and the green cursive of the hills as they ran inside with the bright thunder-crush of the storm snapping at their heels, where Remus immediately changed the radio station to something jangly that Sirius wasn’t sure he liked. With the driving rain and nothing else to do he tried to make mushroom and pea risotto while Remus leaned against the doorframe and watched out the open kitchen door where the burgeoning night had gathered over the bowl of the earth as if he was expecting some long-awaited purging, both of them unspeaking, unmoving, untogether even in this final penance Sirius had come all this way to pay. Whatever he’d been expecting it wasn’t quite this. Eventually the rain slowed and he had a few bites of scorched risotto he could hardly eat and then the thought came unbidden into his head, the one he could never be sure was even his own: What have I done to you, and what have you done to me, and is there any way out?

—

Had it been possible to keep his ugly evaporation from Remus he probably would have done it, but as the effects of his prolonged disintegration were a) omnipresent and b) physical in a way that was impossible to conceal he gave up after not so very long. Occasionally he caught Remus looking at him with something edging close to pity with a strong undercurrent of disgust pulling at the corners of his mouth until Sirius put on the dog and went to wander the wild looming shadows of the woods for the rest of the day; he knew he woke Remus in the night when he couldn’t sleep, rattling around in the kitchen or the bathroom or—once or twice—crying on the couch, but Remus never mentioned it, made no motion of comfort or even the barest syllable of sympathy, and like oil rising sickeningly over water he would recall with livid clarity every time he had ever rubbed Remus’s back or kissed the old silver of his scars before the yolk of the moon broke over the horizon or how the dog had bounded after him into the open mouth of the forest, how he had given him his money, cooked for him, slept beside him, given him his secrets, his body, his dreams, his magic, his love, his bloodied cracked-up beating heart raw and trembling, wondering uselessly for the ten thousandth time if Remus would ever have done the same for him. To which he knew the man himself would have answered, I never asked you to do any of that.

Towards the end of things in ‘81 he’d tried to start thinking of love as a fever he had to sweat out. If it was possible to fall into it then it was also possible to climb out after all, and he reckoned it was necessary for his own relative sanity not least because it was unwanted and had thus taken on a perverse tinge, like cruelly forcing something where it couldn’t go or wearing an ex’s clothes to bed and listening to their favorite songs while they got merrily on with life unknowing and uncaring. Now it felt like another failure stacked on the pyre with all the rest: condemned to wander sick and doomed through the twisted guts of his screaming dying bleeding dripping-wet fucking love. It had become a kind of referendum on his entire existence. The only way forward, he was rapidly beginning to understand, was to treat it like any other deformity until it became just another piece of him to limp around.

Life was so much easier before he had known the taste of Remus’s mouth, before he wondered who or what Remus really was, before he walked into the last compartment on the goddamn Hogwarts Express in 1971, before he forgot Remus’s name and his face and spent twelve years wondering in unfocused, impotent reverie if it had perhaps all been a dream. But he had done it anyway, and he had come all this way only to find that it wasn’t what he thought, that he could no longer reconcile himself with the waking world, that this uncertain pilgrimage had ended in his nightmare sweat soaking into the couch and the final midnight click of Remus’s attic door scraping shut upstairs, softly, softly, as though Sirius had never been inside him, as though Remus had never wanted him there, as though they had never been anything at all.

—

Very late on a Friday about three weeks after Sirius had turned up on the doorstep in a wilting heatwave like a biblical plague Remus woke him as he stumbled drunkenly in through the front door. Through the gauzy curtains Sirius could see the headlights of a truck where a man who didn’t sound like Remus’s blond Muggle artist was saying something to him on the way back down the lane, making Remus laugh that loud hoarse laugh Sirius had never quite been able to pull out of him; perhaps Remus was looking for greener and sexier pastures as he so often did, or perhaps he and his partner weren’t really as serious or as exclusive as he’d made them out to be, although Sirius belatedly recognized this as a warning meant to preempt any grotesque romantic designs on his part. He listened to Remus fumble his way through the wards and the deadbolt on the door and make his way up the stairs to the bathroom and then up the crooked ladder to the attic before he closed his eyes again, trying to feel for the frayed texture of his dream in which Mick Jagger had been helpfully coaching him via radio through the amputation of his own leg.

About ten minutes later the attic door creaked open and Remus came back downstairs, pouring water for tea into the kettle and making an unnecessary amount of noise rummaging through the cupboards. Sirius could feel more than see him hovering in the threshold likely with a mug of chamomile in his hand as if he’d just remembered Sirius was there and was weighing whether he wanted to wade through the emotional carnage littering the floor to sit down or whether he should slip as quietly as he could back upstairs where he could surround himself with his own from the comfort of his own bed. Bless the elephantine gracelessness of the truly wasted, he thought, not without fondness.

“You can turn on the light if you want,” he said. Remus did.

“I was thinking I should make something to eat,” said Remus, sitting down in the armchair by the couch that his mother had favored for as long as Sirius knew her. In both hands he cradled his tea. “It’s cold upstairs.”

“For dinner I made a tart from one of your mum’s old cookbooks. With tomato and goat cheese. It’s not bad cold.”

“A _tart_.”

“Well your eggs were about to go off and I had to do something with some of the tomatoes, they were falling off the vines.” Remus was smiling a little in the corner of his mouth. He didn’t mention that he’d also folded Remus’s laundry and cleaned house and put out the Muggle mail Remus had forgotten before he left, thinking that maybe his only function was to be Remus’s kept man but Remus didn’t want him, if he ever really had. “It sort of helps. Like with remembering things.”

And with feeling marginally less worthless and alone and pathetic, he didn’t say—didn’t need to say. While he was dusting without magic he’d found a very old compendium of fairytales on the bookshelf with a bookmark towards the end, midway through _The Tale of the Three Brothers_ , which detailed gruesomely the wish of the second brother who had unthinkingly brought the woman he loved back from the dead only to watch her go mad when she realized she did not belong in this world. This had seemed too portentous to be a coincidence and yet he remembered he was already one spaghetti noodle short of mental at any given time and no one would care much if he truly lost it except Harry, who was the ganglion glue holding the black bleeding puncture wounds of his mind together. Briefly he considered asking Remus about it but he knew Remus would have told him he was being paranoid, or contrived not to understand. So he kept his mouth shut.

“Did you have a good night?” he asked instead, surprised to find that he mostly meant it despite the throttling of hickeys fading into his shirt that he seemed oddly to be trying to hide.

“He wanted me to stay but I can’t, you know, Dumbledore wants me here. God knows why,” said Remus, not bothering to keep the bite of bitterness from it. Whether the “he” in question was the man who’d brought him home in the truck or the Muggle Sirius chose not to ask, although he wondered for the first time if it had been this obvious to everyone else all those blistering years ago that Remus was fucking Dearborn every time his back was turned. And once when it wasn’t, if rumors sourced from Mundungus Fletcher’s mouth could be believed. “He almost, he reminds me of.” His mouth twisted and bent. “Sorry.”

There was a strange unsweet sting in his head, cold and vengeful, like he’d swallowed half a bottle of champagne and the bubbles had burst in his blood. “It was a long time ago,” he said. A lie. But he’d found that it was sometimes necessary, for himself if no one else.

In the muzzy butter light from the lamp they watched each other across the shadows and the quiet. Of late he’d noticed Remus had a scorched, cut-out look to him, like a man made of erosion, his borders clearly defined. There was no room in him for anything else; he’d made sure of it. By brutal contrast Sirius had only blank black space to fill, space and time, sucking vacuums between scant stars, empty unfeeling swaths of scabland where something had once grown. Sometimes he looked down and was surprised to find he still had a body at all.

“Really it’s a shame. Being attractive was like the only thing you ever sort of had going for you,” said Remus.

“Thanks I guess.”

“That wasn’t—I never actually found you attractive myself,” Remus said with that eerie venomous lightness he used when he wanted to make something hurt like he hurt. By now it was obvious he was feigning drunker than he was. “You were just—”

“Offering? Just there?”

“You were my friend. I thought—this should be easy. But you were never an easy person. You were always, everything about you was always too much. There was nothing but you and your fucking steamroller feelings and nothing else mattered, and how could anyone not feel the same. And how very dare I be anything but a receptacle for every ten-ton emotion you’ve ever had about anything in your life.” Outside he could hear an owlcall from a branch nearby, the curtains catching in the cool breeze. Across the floor the lemon-drop moon moved like a glass eye. “If I was ever going to love anyone it wouldn’t have been you.”

“I believe you.” Over the years the cinematic details of the first time Remus had said something like this to him had replayed in his head so many times that the banality of hearing it now was almost tedious even if it still felt exactly like Remus had dug his fingers into the grist of an old unhealing wound and tore it back open along the seams. No one save his godson would probably ever love him again but in the midst of his late emotional growth spurt he’d at least accepted that Remus couldn’t be blamed for that. “I don’t, I have no idea what you want from me. Everything I do makes you unhappy one way or another and it’s fucking well making me unhappy too so I suppose I should get down on my knees and commit ritual suicide as the ultimate act of contrition or whatever. If I didn’t know better I’d say you got off on this shit.”

“Unhappy,” said Remus, “what the hell do you think you know about _unhappy_.”

“Jesus Christ. Stop it.”

“You used to be—just this massive flood of everything all at once and you’d never even try to turn it off or think about how, how that might feel. Being the focus or the _vehicle_ of something like that. That you never wanted.”

“Seemed to me you were happy enough to take it at the time.”

“But now there’s nothing. Since that summer there’s been nothing and now you’re trying to act like—it’s like you’ve been fucking lobotomized. There’s nothing to you and I don’t understand how, what happened.”

His eyes beneath his pinched brows were very bright as if he was squinting into the sun or trying to read the radial ink-spill of runes sliding around Sirius’s arm above the blanket as if there was something legible there, anything left of Sirius that he could read. You selfish manchild, he thought almost tenderly. You miserable fuck. Never once in the last fourteen years has it occurred to you to get the fuck over yourself and no one suffers for that more than the people who care for you. How many times, he wondered with a cold sudden shock, had Remus thought the same of him?

“Think about it for a while,” said Sirius. “Maybe it’ll come to you.”

“Is it really too much to ask,” said Remus, trailing off.

“Take your tea and go back to bed,” he said. “You’ll feel better in the morning. Or the afternoon I suppose.”

“Don’t you ever wish.”

“Every fucking minute. Yes. I do.”

At dawn Remus woke him again stumbling into the bathroom to puke. Sirius got up and made coffee and ate some of the tomato and goat cheese tart cold and then poured a glass of water and rolled a joint with the last of the pot Vance had given him and took both upstairs and then up the spindly ladder to Remus, who was lying in bed in the attic with the curtains closed and a hand over his eyes to shield them from the weak sunlight catching on the cobwebbed rafters. They passed the joint back and forth, careful not to let their fingers touch, Sirius sitting on the edge of the bed and Remus lying on his back with his reddish hair spilled over the pillow like a crown of thorns or a marble effigy of a saint. Eventually Sirius got up and turned on the radio, which Remus had long ago charmed to pick up stations in India and Libya and Romania and the good American college stations he’d discovered when he was working alternately as a magical exterminator and a teacher at part-human schools in New York and Vermont and California, answering only select among Sirius’s questions as he sat up and sipped his glass of water. Mornings up here in his memory had always smelled like dust and cedar, the light golden and expectant, yearning; if he closed his eyes and leaned far enough into the grey morning light he could almost pretend they were in London again, like they’d never left their flat or their bed or the shelter of each other’s breathing bodies but for the voice on the radio pulling him out of time: _From now on I can see the sun_...

—

Most nights when the summer rain didn’t roll in on the customary shroud of fog he walked along the weedy patchwork of the fields and sometimes into the woods, watching the pinwheel stars gleam overhead like a proof. Only rarely would Remus come with him and usually only when he felt it was necessary as a precaution e.g. he’d seen a whole three cars go down the road into the village eight miles away, and what if one of them happened to recognize an escaped convict slinking into the woods in the velvet dark et cetera, though Sirius suspected it had more to do with the waxing of the moon. One summer he’d come to visit and asked Remus where it happened, and Remus, with his shoulders set into a rigid fault-line, had taken him through the woods along a path strewn with broken twigs and flattened grass ducking quickly underneath every branch and dodging the wild blackberry thorns in a way that suggested frequent sojourns. Foxglove grew in the place where Remus said it had happened. They’d been thirteen or maybe fourteen at the time. Still he wouldn’t realize for at least another year that the look on Remus’s face had been because of him.

“I always told myself that I forgave you for everything but I didn’t really,” Remus told him as they walked together in the hostile and humid gloaming, the slurry hills and the trees sharp and defined as a kid’s paint-by-numbers kit under their clear slice of Somerset sky. “Or some of it, I did. That night last year I meant what I said. But only where it concerns you—only what it cost you. Not me.”

This was still more than Sirius had done for himself, and likely more than Remus had ever forgiven himself for in his entire brittle life. Forgiveness as he now understood it was less about the other person and more about yourself; before it had always seemed to Sirius an incursion of debts which were fundamentally impossible to repay, and so he supposed he’d been looking at this too all wrong from the start. “That’s alright. I mean it’s a little different than like, forgiving Kingsley for interrupting you and whatshisface.”

“Honestly I’d probably forgive Kingsley for anything.”

“He’s so like, chiseled. Those _arms_.”

“He wouldn’t be interested, Sirius.” Between them the crickets and the muffled music of the woods pulsed and thrummed like a heartbeat. “And I’m not sure that this is, it’s all been forced on you, is what I’m saying. So. I’m not entirely sure I believe you.”

“Fair enough.”

“I’m not a vessel for your personal growth.”

“I’m not one for yours either,” said Sirius, “or for you to pretend I’m the source of all the bullshit in your life at any given time and thus you just can’t help it, or whatever.”

“For what it’s worth even after all your dramatics the other night I’ve really got no idea what you want from me either, if we’re talking about that. Or that it’s something I’m going to be willing to give.”

Glancing sideways at Remus he felt fleetingly compelled to remind him of who had been responsible for starting said dramatics, but his heart wasn’t in it. “What about you, then.”

“What about me.”

“Nevermind,” said Sirius. “I want—I don’t want to feel so guilty anymore and I don’t want you to feel like shit either. I hate it—it guts me. Probably it’s taken a decade off my life. And I’d like to try to be your friend again, if you want.” Again he forced himself to look at Remus, but he was looking at something far off down the gravel road. “I want to try and do better by you.”

Silence, indecipherable, stretching like taffy. “I don’t know how much I want that,” said Remus, very quietly. For a while they didn’t say anything, walking interminably on until the night swallowed the earth whole, leaving everything unsaid in each other’s hands as they had always done. What other choice was there?

“I know,” said Sirius. “But just, Remus. Would it kill you to let me try?”

At last Remus turned to look at him in the dark the way he had not looked at him for more than fifteen years. The night befit him as it always had, his eyes and his hair like August gold, his long rack-stretched limbs and his face like something scrawled from midsummer smoke under the brimming yellow moon. Here you are, Sirius thought. Here you are. My most cherished wound. My only, my final remaining wish in this world.

“We’ll see,” said Remus. On the way back home he watched their shadows pull apart across the tall grass like the hands of a clock, marking time.

—

Time confounds. It rises and rises like water. Often he would sit on Remus’s couch and feel sixteen years old again until he remembered he was thirty-five, and then sometimes he would feel ninety or twenty-one or five thousand. In certain ways this wasn’t so different from being in Azkaban, where time spread and flowed like treacle through the holes in his brain-shards and his body and his soul and was about as useful a concept as taking a compass into space: from the backyard or the couch or the shower he could reach back into childhood or the Gryffindor dormitory or his uncle Alphard’s big house in Chelsea, loot from all the time he spent cooking dinner with Remus after work, Lily laughing her huge unladylike laugh and James defending his fondness for Peter Frampton, at a club with Dorcas and McKinnon, reading to Harry, Saturday mornings in the flat with a cup of coffee in bed and the sunlight lancing through the window onto the flannel sheets tangled at Remus’s thighs, autumn in his mouth. Sometimes he thought he was always seeing himself elsewhere and it became difficult, when he was alone, to sift through it all, or not to become unstuck from the present. Like it had happened to someone else, which he supposed it had.

Evenings Remus left and went to the pub or out to see his blond Muggle artist, and Sirius read books and listened to records Remus had recommended or cooked entirely without magic and took long walks and very long baths or watched television, which mostly made him wish he could’ve gone to the Muggle cinema as he’d always liked it before, the strange tight intimacy of it, the wonder that seemed to him not altogether unlike magic but in a different way from Muggle music which was older and much more wounded. Vance came to visit him and usually shared her pot and her secondhand spy novels, sitting with her feet up on Remus’s coffee table every time, and sometimes Kingsley came too; once Moody had come, ostensibly to discuss nascent Order business, but as the visit progressed Sirius began to suspect that he was trying to apologize for any number of things and uncomfortably changed the subject every time he sensed the opening notes of a gruff but heartfelt overture swelling up from Remus’s armchair. Andromeda’s daughter—Tonks—had shown up too. At first he didn’t recognize her. She’d fairly crushed him in a hug on the way in and back out and she’d come with armfuls of cassettes she thought he should hear and books on wandless magic and a bag stuffed full of sweets from Diagon Alley he couldn’t possibly eat; over tea she told him she was living in London with a French girl she’d met on a surveillance job in Manchester. After she left Sirius sat at the kitchen table for an hour crying until long after dark.

By conventional standards he was doing nominally better, or he thought he was. He got up and showered every morning and made coffee and ate what he could and forced it if he couldn’t. He went for walks and worked on his magic wandlessly and read the _Prophet_ and Remus’s Muggle newspaper and drank too much but didn’t sleep all day or fantasize about killing himself too much. Rather than seethe sleeplessly all night or cry or turn catatonic underneath all twenty tons of regret every time he closed his eyes he tried to write things down in a blank journal he’d found on the bookshelf and had hidden under one of the couch cushions like he was fucking seventeen, or else he got up and wandered possibly stupidly into the woods and picked blackberries by moonlight to lick his open wounds. Occasionally Remus would help him make dinner, and if Sirius was still awake when he got home at night (he was, always) he’d sit up with him and talk for a while, although Sirius wondered if this stemmed from the same pang of guilt one might feel at coming home to a neglected pet rather than any real interest. He tried not to hate him for it, as he guessed Remus tried not to hate him for any of it, too. They lived with it, whatever it was, they woke up with it and ate it and drank it and shat it and slept beside it and spoke to it and breathed it and dreamed it and heard it whispering always at the pulsebeat-core of every song, snagging on every muscle and every memory, every word and every day.

Towards the end of the month he was writing another letter to Harry with the insides of a cursed clock Kingsley said he’d found at a yard sale spread out on the coffee table and a glass of iced tea balanced on top of some of his notes against the blaring and fragrant summer breeze when he heard Remus come in through the back door. Dumbledore had spoken to him by Floo that morning, which could mean nothing good; after he’d left Sirius had spent the rest of the morning cleaning the bathroom and walking down to the old pond overgrown with cattails to watch the stalking herons wade for fish.

“Have you been cooking?” Remus asked from wherever he was fumbling around in the kitchen.

“I made maple shortbread with some of your syrup. It’s not bad.” He’d been looking a bit nervously through Hope Lupin’s ancient copy of _Muggle Confections Made Magic_ and had found some of her faded notes so endearing he’d decided to make an attempt at something relatively simple. “Where’d you go?”

Remus made a doubtful noise and got something out of a cabinet. “London,” he said, coming into the living room and looking down at the mess on the couch and coffee table. “Good God.”

“I’ll clean it up later.”

“You used to act like I was bad. Anyway clear it off, I bought us a curry.”

Sirius put everything away as neatly as he could and cleared off enough space for Remus to maneuver two of his mother’s old chipped-china plates full of cashew curry and pakoras and another glass of iced tea onto the coffee table. From the couch Remus turned on the radio wandlessly as they ate, the sky outside gathering pure vibrant crystal blue with the coming sunset and the sun-warmed earth woozy and full of a heavy, saturated summertime languor that made him feel at the edge of something, like a glass kite waiting for a good gust of wind. In the sulky-slow breeze the curtains caught and tangled, their shadows trembling across the floor in the sinuous late gold of the sunlight; like a matchstrike he could smell the roses and the honeyed heat and the woods, mournful as music or the soft midnight hush, like something plucked out of vivid eternity.

“Who were you writing to,” Remus asked after a minute. Playing on the radio was a commercial advertising a sex shop using terrible epithets, which they’d both laughed themselves stupid about while washing dishes a few days ago.

“Harry again. He’s doing alright. Just frustrated. And sad, which is kind of, I don’t know, I’m not exactly the person to give advice considering the obvious.” Harry did however have an ability to elucidate his emotions in a way Sirius didn’t think he or Remus had ever possessed, which was almost startlingly alien to him. Now it was probably too late for both of them. “I never really learned anything from my own dismal life lessons until it was too late so mostly I end up feeling like an enormous fraud.”

“All Harry probably wants right now is to hear from you and know you’re listening, wherever you are. That’s a big thing when you’re fifteen years old, just feeling heard.”

“Mostly I remember like, not being able to turn the volume down in my head or control my voice.”

“That too,” said Remus. “Sirius—he’s going to ask you to use your house. I think he’d already be in there but it’s, well I might as well just tell you he’s been making more noise about it. After like seventeen years of dealing with his mystical bullshit it stops being so subtle.”

And yet for all this Remus still wouldn’t breathe a word against him, perhaps understandably. “I’ve know that for a while,” he said, “and I don’t really see any way around it.” Really the old man was much more obvious than he liked to think he was: Sirius had realized what he wanted and exactly what would be expected of him over a Floo conversation at Arabella Figg’s more than a month previous but had decided to let him keep dropping enigmatic hints so he could think he was putting the embryonic idea in Sirius’s head for him to arrive at the conclusion all on his own. “I think I’ll drag it out and let him ask me outright though. That thing he does, there’s like nothing more insulting—nudging you towards whatever he wants and acting like it wasn’t his idea all along.”

Remus was pushing some rice around with his fork with his lips and his brows drawn very tight the way they always were when he was either trying to let something go or about to say something he’d obviously been rehearsing for a long time. “This isn’t exactly—” he gestured with his open palm to encompass their plates and the couch, the living room windows, the kitchen, the back door propped open with a battered copy of _The Golden Bough_ and the clothes hanging on the line under mindless summer sky opening into something else— “ _ideal_ , and I know that. But Sirius. You can’t possibly think that’s a good idea.”

“I mean personally I think it’s complete shit but I also don’t think there’s any other decent option, and if the old man cared about people as anything other than a means to an end or fucking, I don’t know, human chess pieces or whatever we wouldn’t be having this conversation. That’s how he’s always been. Needs of the many or something.”

“Is that really fair.”

“The point is it’s a foregone conclusion so we both might as well get used to it.”

“You told me once we always have choices.”

“And sometimes you pay for those,” said Sirius. “You know that as well as I do.”

Quiet, then. A song came on the radio he knew he used to know but Remus switched the station with a jerk of his hand to something that sounded like a toothless Nirvana ripoff. “That wasn’t really what I meant,” he said.

“Alright. So what did you mean?”

“You said you wanted to try to better by me. What’s this even about, if.”

“I do. I’m trying,” said Sirius. Remus fixed him with a stare. “What about you.’

It was Remus who looked away first. “Don’t be an idiot,” he said.

Eventually they cleared the plates away and went out back to sit on the lopsided stone bench in the garden with some shortbread which Remus conceded wasn’t terrible after all; he thought about asking if Remus wanted to go for a walk or putting on the dog just to go bounding into the tall grass in the sunset fields, but for once he sat still next to Remus while the sky smudged molten red and gold and bruising violet where the earth burned into the sky, the songbirds bearing up their longing to the first of the late summer stars. As a teenager he used to think the world opened up at the seams here, and a few times when he’d come to stay with Remus he’d gotten up early just to walk the fields with Remus and a thermos of coffee and scones to watch the sun come up struck and astonished over the green lilt of the hills, everything new, everything alive. The whole world waiting. It seemed to him as he got older definitive proof that there were still things unspoiled in this world. Sitting beside Remus with their thighs and their hands untouching listening to the mournful velvet summer-song he supposed it still did even now.

“Do you want some tea?” Remus asked him, probably just for something to say. 

“Maybe later. I was thinking maybe if we survive this I’ll buy the house from you.”

“Why in heaven’s name would you do that.”

“I don’t know. I’ve always liked it here, it’s like, you can hear the world breathing. And that way you could take off to wherever. Go back to America or Canada or something.”

“I’ve already been everywhere,” said Remus. “It’s not like it’s done me any good.” Nearby a nightjar called into the wilting breeze, patiently, clear as crystal and inconsolable as desire. “There’s always been this part of me, you know, that never quite accepted it. That I guess never entirely accepted any of it.”

“Because it’s like, if you accept it then what was any of it even _for_.”

“And how do you live if it’s all really over.”

“And how do you live knowing it’s not.”

A good tragedy, Sirius reflected, hinged on ending the story at just the right moment. Let it go on too long and it all turns to vinegar and weepy daytime television. And yet they had never been rid of each other, and he understood now that they never would be: it was as though some centrifugal ley line had been drawn before they even met, split from the same atom, born of the same doomed stars, through thick and through thin, for better and for worse. It was too pretty to think it was something as abstract as fate and yet. And yet and yet and yet. What else could it be?

Looking at Remus in the miraculous dusklight made him think of border-lines, Augusts and Octobers and seashores, the smell of rain just at the edge of falling, the sickle-sliver shadow covering the full face of the moon. That inexorable finger’s-breadth between one thing and another. He was sure he’d had this thought before but he couldn’t remember why; the longer he turned it over in his mind the more he wondered if it was really Remus or if it was the space between them where they weren’t touching, or where they had touched before, how they might have touched if they’d wanted it, if they could. Possibility. One thing and another, and another.

“Some days I think I spent so long forgetting you that it’s like I wonder if I ever knew you at all. In addition to being convinced I never actually knew you for obvious reasons,” said Remus. “Like I can’t remember how you take your tea or your eggs. Or whether there was even any good to you at all because mostly what I thought of was the worst. You’re quieter than I thought you’d be and this is like, the first I’ve seen you sit still in days.”

“Honestly Remus I forgot a lot about you. For a while I couldn’t remember your name. And I don’t really remember much about London except like, snapshot flashes, and I forgot how you walked and talked and what whiskey you liked or that haircut you’ve had since like ‘78. I thought sometimes I dreamed most of it.”

“It’s weird.”

“What is.”

“Having you here,” said Remus, getting up from the bench and walking to the edge of the garden, “looking at you, hearing you speak.”

“None of this is how I imagined it’d be.”

“It isn’t. It could never be.”

“But I’m here though,” said Sirius, “I’m here now.”

Across the yard standing at the very limit of the light Remus’s eyes were very bright, every other form and feature of the landscape warping around him like a pulsar or the shrill glass crush of moonrise, the feeling of it shivering along his spine and his rib-rungs like a pure spinal strike of déjà vu. He could almost get his fingernails underneath the liminal splinters of the memory before it was reeled again into the smothering ether. Still he couldn’t bring himself to wish it away.

“Come look,” Remus was saying, his voice alive, overflowing, “there’s deer.” For another moment he hung onto the last thread of the beloved unmemory as tightly as he could. Then Sirius got up and went to him.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [here](http://montpahrnah.tumblr.com/) on tumblr if you need to yell at me!


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